Letters: ‘Between the World and Me’

Sept. 24, 2015

To the Editor:

Reading Michelle Alexander’s review of “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Sept. 6), I couldn’t help wondering why she ignores the importance of Malcolm X in this moving letter to Coates’s son. Coates looks to Malcolm as the voice of freedom. He wants blacks to dance, “as free as Malcolm’s voice.” Malcolm is free because he walks outside “the Dream”: a dream built on the backs of black bodies.

For Coates, the dream that began in enslavement perpetuates the power divide between black and white. Finally it is this dream that cannot protect his friend Prince Jones from death. Freedom, Coates argues, emerges out of continued questioning, writing and an expansion of consciousness that he hopes will move his son to prize his worth and to struggle to change America. Expanding consciousness is crucial. Malcolm’s ideas enlarged after he returned from Mecca and saw blue-eyed Muslims, and Coates’s consciousness finds a broader trajectory at Howard University, where in his Mecca he encounters the panoply of black experience, and in Paris, where he no longer sees with his “Baltimore eyes.”

Coates’s struggle may seem amorphous, but in some ways it is more like Occupy Wall Street than the organized efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Perhaps one can argue that Coates is searching for new forms of struggle that do not ask or challenge, but assert and actively ensure that Black Lives Matter.

FLORENCE TAGER

BROOKLYN

The writer is a professor emerita at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College.

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To the Editor:

After reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” my reaction was exactly that of your reviewer, Michelle Alexander, who questions the efficacy of the dispiriting pessimism that permeates the book: “We must not ask whether it is possible for a human being or society to become just or moral; we must believe . . . in this possibility — no matter how slim.” This is particularly true when our audience is young people, whether our children or our students.

Many years ago, a young black man in my Law and Society class asked, “Why is it that we always study the bad things that are done to black people, like the Scottsboro cases?” I interpreted this as asking, “Aren’t black people, rather than just being victims, sometimes agents of their own liberation?” and resolved to teach a six-week unit, using Richard Kluger’s magisterial “Simple Justice,” to show them how a dedicated group of Howard Law School graduates — most famous among them Thurgood Marshall — devoted decades of their lives to dismantling the pernicious “separate but equal” doctrine.

Year after year my students, regardless of their racial background, found this example of indefatigable black attorneys and poor, courageous black plaintiffs risking life, limb and livelihood in the cause of justice to be ennobling. Many of them are today doing exactly as Alexander suggests: dedicating themselves “to playing a meaningful role in the struggle.”

The unrelenting pessimism of Ta-Nehisi Coates can only discourage similar dedication among youthful readers of his book.

RICK NAGEL

MERCER ISLAND, WASH.

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Instant Recognition

To the Editor:

Whether or not David Lagercrantz has captured the character of Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” (Sept. 6), the stunning illustration by Angie Wang told me what the lead review was about before I read a word.

LESLIE HEFNER

OBERLIN, OHIO

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Bond Under Covers

To the Editor:

You illustrated the review of Anthony Horowitz’s “Trigger Mortis” (Sept. 6) with the cover art for the first edition of Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger.” I was very sorry to see that you did not acknowledge the artist. His name was Richard Chopping (1917-2008), and he created the covers of nine of Fleming’s Bond novels. Those books are, of course, tripe and quite unworthy of the work of Chopping — one of the masters of book cover design.

MICHAEL GORMAN

CHICAGO

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If Werther Could Tweet

To the Editor:

I was dismayed by Ann Beattie’s offhand dismissal of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (By the Book, Aug. 30). As a study in self-importance taken to the point of narcissism, with the protagonist sending daily status updates while desperately looking for approval, “Werther” is the novel of our time.

PATRICK FORTMANN

CHICAGO

The writer is an assistant professor of Germanic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Filipino Voices

To the Editor:

Jon Fasman, in his review of two novels by Eka Kurniawan (Sept. 13), is right to point out that Southeast Asia is a “region underrepresented in the Western literary consciousness.” Very much so.

Take Philippine literature, for example. Despite its rich tradition, both in English and the vernacular, it is largely unknown. It has a roster of living writers worthy of the Nobel: F. Sionil José, Virginia Moreno, E. San Juan Jr., Erwin Castillo, Alfred A. Yuson and Ninotchka Rosca, just to name a few. This shameful neglect is often blamed on marketability, but more shameful still, these writers along with others of Southeast Asian origin are mostly condescended to without being read.

WILLIE SANCHEZ

HOFFMAN ESTATES, ILL.

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Attention Must Be Paid

To the Editor:

In my view, the best book about work isn’t really a book (Bookends, Sept. 13). Although definitely literature, it is Arthur Miller’s timeless play “Death of a Salesman.” Whether we love or disdain our jobs, we must all eventually grapple with the true worth of what we do and the time we devote to it.